According to current research

One of my daughter's library books, Does a Triceratops Have Polka Dots?, includes this line: "Dinosaurs were the ancestors of today's birds, but they didn't have feathers and they couldn't fly."

That's not true. Some dinosaurs did have feathers. In Sasha's other books we learned that Archaeopertyx had feathers, and Velociraptor had feathers, and baby T. Rexes had feathers. (These weren't flight feathers but instead kept the dinos warm.)

Those other books, of course, are more recent.

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Fifteen years ago Time Life published a book which stated that dinosaurs did not have feathers. Now all the illustrations in children's books about dinosaurs show theropods with feathers. However, the books explain, we can't know what color those feathers were. Fifteen years from now we'll exclaim over that, because "scientists have decoded the full-body color patterns of a dinosaur."

Click that link. It's really cool. It shows a 3D rendering of an Anchiornis huxleyi, a dinosaur new to science (as they say). It doesn't look at all like our mental images of a dinosaur. It looks like a bird. It looks just exactly like a bird. National Geographic also has a pretty accurate picture of Sinosauropteryx, which was brown-and-white, apparently, and less distinctly birdish.

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My dino-loving daughter has a couple of books which trace the history of our understanding of dinosaurs. That is, the books describe how with each fossil discovery paleontologists revised their mental image of dinosaurs.

At first they thought T. Rex looked like Godzilla, stomping around on two legs with his stumpy hands waving in the air. Now they say he looked like a colossal roadrunner, with his long neck and tail perfectly horizontal. He had such huge jaws they figured he was a terrifying creature, as in Jurassic Park; but now they say that given his tiny arms, he must have been a scavenger — more like a vulture than a crocodile.

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One day 65 million years ago a meteor smashed into the earth, wreaking such havoc that all the big sauropods died, and all the big theropods and ornithiscians died, too. All those freaky, frightening, glorious giants died — but not all the dinosaurs died. Some lived. They lived, their feathers evolved, they learned to fly. All the 9,900 species of birds alive today are the descendants of dinosaurs.

It's a lovely, comforting theory. I wonder if it's true.